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Saturday, 2 July 2011

July's Market Version

I've just rolled out the next update for Llama that contains all of the changes from the last few betas. Some of the highlights of this version are Noisy Contacts and an improved calendar condition.

Noisy Contacts could be an app on its own, but it's bundled into Llama's profiles. Noisy Contacts lets you choose the people that your phone should ring for even if its volume is set to silent. The way this works is each profile is assigned any number of contacts, and you also provide the volume that you want to override the profile's usual ringing volume. You can also use this feature in reverse. If you want to stop your boss calling you during your time off, you can create a profile that has your boss as a noisy contact, with the volume set to silent. That way your phone will ring for everyone except for him! Perfect for weekends :)

The calendar condition was fairly rubbish when it was first released. Many of you wanted to be able to respond to any calendar event, or a number of differently named calendar events. Llama now lets you enter zero or more words that should match a calendar event. Llama also lets you pick which calenders those events should be in.

Another experimental feature has also crept it. As I discussed in another blog post, you can get Llama to respond to notifications from other apps. The UI for this is not completed yet. Geeks only :) Finally, there's a debug setting to disable writing the Recent cells list to disk, simply because someone asked for it and I'm nice.

There's also a handful of other actions and conditions, and the odd UI tweak. See below:

Version 1.2011.07.02.1835:

Noisy Contacts - set some contacts to ring even when silent!

Ignore cells

Profiles UI improvement

Fix for setting volume on newer HTCs

Minimalistic Text Widget support

Conditions:

Calendar allows any/multiple names, allows you to choose calendar

Airplane mode

Connect/disconnect ANY WiFi

Monitor other app notifications

Actions:

Run shortcuts, more apps eg Google Maps Nav

4G

Wifi sleep policy

Haptic feedback

Kill with root

Wallpaper

Reminders improved

So what's the next big change I hear you ask? After adding the Wifi connected/disconnected condition I noticed a lot more Llama freezes :( This is because the API call that Llama needs to monitor Wifi connections has a tendency to just freeze for about 10 seconds sometimes... randomly... long enough to a) annoy you b) annoy me and c) make Android show the 'Application not responding' window. When Llama was first written, it only had 13 actions and conditions, now it has 50! Llama needs to evolve from a silly single-threaded app into a proper multi-threaded application. There'll be the usual handful of smaller actions/conditions too. Cheers all.